I am a common Indian man and I do not support Ramdev Baba

While the world is pretty much busy is supporting or opposing the fast by the yoga guru Ramdev Baba and a pretty small section of people creating hype over it on the net and social media, I can find the voice of the common Indian man almost neglected in all this chaos. Supporting Ramdev Baba, or for that matter, Anna Hazare has been a craze in the tech-geeky, and often misleaded, youth. Though no one is expecting a magical change in situations, everyone is expecting something to change, without knowing exactly what. The supporters of Ramdev Baba, though a very small fraction of the huge Indian population, are succeeding to make their voice loud enough to seem true, and the majority of Indian population is left as a dumb spectator of all the events passing.

When I see the over-enthusiastic youth to propose support for these protests, have they ever thought about the consequences of it? These protests are nothing but the means for creating an anti-government sentiment in the country. The UPA has been in power for the last seven years. For the first-term, the BJP-lead NDA could not even find an agenda for the polls and lost the elections even without fighting wholeheartedly. This time they cannot afford to do so. The extreme right-wing Hindutva ideology cannot be successful each and every time. They needed something as an adjunctive to the Hindutva ideology.

Baba Ramdev and Sangha Pariwar:
BJP (or for that matter RSS) has a very small, but every strong and loyal, core support group. In the democracy of “one vote per head”, they can never ascend to power depending only on this core support group and they know it well. To overcome this factor, the Sangh Parivar always tries to spread its wings as wide as possible to cover a second-line support from the society which would increase the headcount. Organizations like Bharatiya Janata Party, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajarang Dal, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, and so on are just the spread wings of the Sangha Pariwar where the top leadership comes from the core group and the headcount come from the second-line supporters.

Where does Ramdev Baba come to the scene? He is just a bonus that the Sangha Parivar can have. He is not in any way officially affiliated to the RSS (though the support and think-tank support is apparent). Rather, he has kept himself aloof only to say people that “Look, I am not attached to any political party.” He has already gained much follower support from his yoga activities and now he is trying to turn this follower group to the third-line support group of the Sangha Parivar. Sangha needs as much as support from their core circle as they can gather and that’s why they are supporting Ramdev Baba.

Why not Saffron?
People may ask why am I being a saffron-phobic? The congress has ruled over this country for most of the time? What if we ask for a change now? Before going to the answer, I want to make a disclaimer that I am a common India man, I happened to be a Hindu, my father used to go to daily shakha of the Sangha (in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Ram Mandir issue was on hype), and I am not attached to any political party in any slightest way. I am no more involved in politics more than casting my vote when election comes. My interests are far nonpolitical – reading, music, films, etc. – then why should I bother who is there ruling on top?

I am a common Indian young man, 27 years old. I hold the Constitution of India to the top. I cannot segregate people (as the saffron group tends to do) based on their cast, creed, or religion. I am a firm believer of “We, The People of India.” I cannot think myself as a Hindu, Maharastrian, or anything for that matter. Nothing can come between me and my Indian-ness.

We live in a secular democracy. We know it is the best type of state for the varied culture of India. The ideology of Saffron Pariwar is exactly opposite to this. They cannot gain power with what limited support they have from their core group. All their efforts are to increase their outer circles using fascist means: Vociferous propaganda, continuous advertising, favorable use of media, and now effective use of social media. Baba Ramdev and other are just puppets to create a headcount in outer circles. They will promise everything and even implement on it. But isn’t it what Hitler did to achieve powers. We can certainly give him credit for blowing new life in the then Germany, which was going through serious economic crisis and post-war depression. He promised people of good governance, and he worked for it, but then he also used his hatred policy against Jews as the means to polarize the vote bank and he succeeded. Can India afford to let the saffron parties succeed? Can India afford oligarchy, if not dictatorship? Think once again, think thousand times, you may not have the freedom to think and express in that regime.

Tragedy of Indian democracy:
This is just an update to what I have written above. All the day, as I was keeping an eye on the events, I could see BJP people openly in support of Baba Ramdev. I cannot understand the logic behind this. BJP is the largest party in the opposition. The people of India have elected them to ask question to the government. The constitution of India has given them the platform of parliament to ask questions. The government is responsible to them for any of their action; and what the opposition does, walks out of the parliament during the sessions and sets up and joins the protests on road! And people go behind them, what else can be the tragedy of India democracy?

Is Hinduism really in danger?

 Over the last couple of days, numerous hoardings have been sprung up on the streets of Nagpur depicting Narendra Maharaj (who is claimed to be Jagadguru, the spiritual mentor of the world, by his followers) proclaiming Hinduism is in danger as it has no state support anywhere in the world (particularly in India). These posters are apparently a part of the bigger agenda of the Hindutva Parivar to polarize the Hindus against the non-Hindus and thus create a vote bank for the Hindu fundamentalist parties. Though such efforts particularly appear to the common man, these also do raise serious questions in the minds of those Indians who are proud of the principal of secularism enshrined in the Constitution of India.
Is Hinduism really in danger? From whom? Left us handle this question a bit systemically. A Hindu state has been a longstanding demand of the Hindutva fundamentalists in India dating back to the early years of the 20th century when V. D. Sawarkar coded the philosophy of Hindutva in his book Hindutva. India, as claimed by the Pariwar, itself is a Hindu nation because of its Hindu majority. But India also has a large population of Muslims too. India has the third largest Muslim population in the world only after Indonesia and Pakistan. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has correctly noted, “Too see India just as a country of Hindus is a fairly bizarre idea in the face of that fact alone (the fact of its Muslim population), not to mention the intermingling of Hindus and Muslims in the social and cultural life of India.” Also India has been home to a large number of Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Parsis, and so on. All these people are Indians by Nationality, and due to this fact, claiming India to be a solely Hindu nation is really a “bizarre India.”

Another aspect of this question is does Hinduism (or any religion for that matter) really needs state support? Indeed, religious have been spread and flourished for ages by state help. State support of Ashoka to Buddhism, of Arabs to Islam, of Romans to Christianity have been helped a lot to spread those religions all over the world in the past. Hinduism had spread to Java and Sumatra with the imperialist kings of South India. But those were the things of past. Is it possible in this age to convert a mass of people from one religion to another by force? Yes, conversions still occur, but there are various reasons behind those and force has little, if any, role to play with it. Religion is supported by its followers. If state has any role to support it, it is secondary. We have seen in the history that religion like Din-e-Ilahi, which was founded by the Akbar, could survive even in his lifetime though it was the regions professed by the emperor himself. And as a matter of fact, Hinduism has survived for ages despite the fact that India has been a subject of various foreign powers for a vast period over this time. This proves that state support is absolutely secondary force in survival and flourishing of any religion. An in a secular state like India, it is absolute unnecessary.

 Let us move towards our main question: Is Hinduism really in danger? It is totally impossible to believe that such an overwhelming majority can be in danger for the minorities. And not merely a majority of numbers, but a majority in every aspect of state – legislation, executive, judiciary, press, military, etc. But this is a less important argument. Hindus are safe not because they are in majority, but because of the multireligious harmony that has been a core part of our Indianness.

Despite the interreligious harmony, conversions do happen in India, and sometimes en masse, but state has nothing to do with it. The Constitution of India has given us a fundamental right to accept and profess a faith of our own choice. What make the people to give up the beloved faith of their ancestors is the most important question . The hostile approach of the upper-class Hinds towards the depressed classes make the poor people to incline towards any love shown by others to them. Many peoples of scheduled tribes have accepted Christianity because of this reason. Another prominent example is of the so-called untouchables who converted to Buddhism en masse, about 400,000, under the able leadership of Dr. Ambedkar. We cannot blame them for their act, because they had been treated rather inhumanly by the Hindus for ages.

The above examples light up the fact that if there is any real danger to Hinduism in a long run, it is from the fundamentalist Hindus themselves who have hijacked the term Hindu for their selfish aims. Their hostility towards their own people and their belligerent attitude towards the others have made a common Hindu to think seriously about his being a Hindu. As Bhalchandra Nemade, a prominent Marathi author, has noted:

"Once Hindu meant all the people living on this side of Sindhu (Indus) River. But now Hindu has become a word in the hands of Hindu fundamentalists, it has been a matter of shame to call yourself a Hindu."

This is not a feeling of Nemade alone. It is a feeling of every common Hindu who is proud of India’s multireligious harmony. To protect our Indianness, the antisecular agenda must be fought against with all of our strength. We are not a Hindu, Muslim, Christan, Buddhist, or Sikh nation – We are Indian at first and Indian from the heart.

To quote Amartya Sen again, “There are good reasons to resist the antisecular enticements... The winter of our discontent might not be giving way at present to a glorious summer, but the political abandonment of secularism would make India more wintry than it currently is.”

*Notes*
1. Sen, Amartya (2005), The Argumentative Indian, “Secularism and Its Discontent”, London: Penguin Books. P. 308
2. Nemade, Bhalchandra, “Reviving the true Hindu Ethos”, An interview with Meena Menon, The Hindu, July 4, 2010.